Reviewing IGSN Metadata Standards for Archaeological and Heritage Samples

This temporary working group (TWG) aims to evaluate the existing community metadata profiles for registering IGSN IDs (International Generic Sample Numbers) in the context of archaeological and cultural heritage studies. It is designed as a work package of the ongoing Trail “IGSN Identifiers: A Sustainable PID Strategy for Archaeological and Heritage Samples”.  The goal is to raise awareness of this sample identification system within the NFDI4Objects community and meanwhile establish a common ground for describing material samples. The outcomes will pave the way for the construction of a long-term IGSN service in archaeology and cultural heritage communities.  

We will review and discuss two IGSN community standards (the Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Community of Practice and the Heritage Sample Digital Archive) that have been developed to describe physical samples for the DOI registration through DataCite. The metadata fields will be thoroughly examined and documented to ensure that they capture necessary information for community needs besides DataCite requirements.  The recommended metadata profile will be circulated across different task areas within NFDI4Objects to gather input from specialists. Its usefulness will be accessed through use cases from a range of physical samples of different object types and material groups, such as archaeometallurgical remains, ancient DNA specimens, and conservation materials, providing concrete examples of how investigated samples are properly described for the IGSN registration. 

Specifically, we will review and discuss current initiatives (the Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Community of Practice and the Heritage Sample Digital Archive) as well as other relevant standards (e.g., the N4O Minimal Metadata Set and Conservation Metadata from TA4) to assess how well their properties, vocabularies, and relational structures apply to material samples from different research contexts within NFDI4Objects.

In addition, a core set of controlled vocabularies will be discussed and recommended to populate the established IGSN ID metadata fields wherever appropriate, enhancing curation efficiency and accuracy. Existing terminologies can be applied for material types (Art & Architecture Thesaurus), periods (PeriodO), researchers (ORCID), organisations (ROR), and places (GeoNames and Getty TGN). Meanwhile, we will perform crosswalks between generic schemas (DataCite, Dublin Core, and schema.org) and community schemas (e.g., TerraLID, N4O Minimal Metadata Set, and Conservation Metadata) to achieve interoperability across diverse data sources.

The TWG will neither create a new metadata profile for material samples nor establish a technical infrastructure for the registration of IGSN IDs. It will simply raise awareness and evaluate the usefulness of IGSN within NFDI4Objects.

The TWG aims to deliver the following outcomes: 

• Create online complementary documentation for the IGSN metadata schema, managed through version control on GitHub.

• Publish metadata crosswalks between different community schemas on Zenodo.

• Present and register use cases from archaeometallurgy, conservation, bioarchaeology on an online sample registry platform.

Whitepaper: Guidelines for Metadata Documentation in the Registration of IGSN IDs for Archaeological and Heritage Sample